Lead magnets magic for business and personal brands

A quick guide to launch a good lead magnet: for who, how and which content can work well.

Look, I was a believer in an open not gated content (and still am), as I found it odd, that you need to leave an email for reading an article, but number of times I have seen lead magnets work amazingly for many brands and influencers, and for lead generation purposes it became a literal magic for lowering the CAC.

So I have decided to give a try.

Because I strongly believe we should not choose marketing channels and tools by our own prejudices.

First of all, what is a lead magnet?

© Mailchimp has a pretty good definition.

Lead magnet is a lead generation tool that you use to trade for a customer's contact information for free useful stuff, like a free sample, resource, or tool.

Lead magnet types.

1. PDF Workbooks, checklists, e-books

2. Free video lecture (webinar)

3. Guides (web, notion, pdf)

4. White paper (comprehensive research)

5. Quizzes or tests

6. Calculators and spreadsheet templates (budget, marketing planning)

7. Notion data base (organized useful information, such as events to attend or list of investors)

These are the main types I have seen being used in business. I decided to experiment both on our customer project and my personal project in 2024 and here is how we did it and what we learned.

Launching GenAI for work guide and a webinar with Sololearn.

For the new GenAI course launch for Sololearn in March - May 2024, we have decided to create a waitlist to measure success prior to launch.

We wanted to see if there is interest. Launching the waitlist would simply work with few sign-ups, but our goal was a really big list.

We knew we needed to strengthen the motivation, so we came up with the following plan:

1. Simple waitlist announcement

2. Join waitlist and get a free guide

3. Join free webinar, get a guide and be the first to know about the course

Free guide about using Generative AI got the highest conversion rate of 3 from CRM, paid ads and organic social, with a webinar as a runner up.

We had over 22’000 waitlist registrations 2.5 weeks after announcement, 2’000+ people watched webinar and overall we were pretty pleased with the results.

Product Positioning Playbook and Nike case study. Success and a fail.

Second time I decided to test with my course’s third cohort launch this fall, to build a waitlist and newsletter list.

I decided to give 3 materials for free:

1. Product positioning playbook (pdf guide)

2. Lecture about Nike positioning change (actual case study from my experience in a video format).

3. AI in marketing use cases and tools Miro board.

First two had LinkedIn posts, Instagram stories and Telegram channel single posts as a promotion. Although second had Nike name on it, the results clearly showed the winner 👀

For someone with a little over 2k LinkedIn followers and on average 1k impressions on posts, that’s not too bad, right?

The third one led to pretty good engagement rate on LinkedIn (see the chart below), but my mistake was not to measure anyhow visits and views. Feedback though in DMs has been phenomenal. Which I consider a success too 🥳

Why did Nike one not work well? I think due to few reasons: it was a case study, so nothing to “take away” as a template for people to use, more to inspire and this kind of information should be not gated.

And to be very fair it was not a great recording (audio, video quality), so it did not create a wow effect. Which brings me to an important topic: good and bad lead magnets.

Criteria for a really good lead magnet

1. It should be helpful and target to solve customer’s or reader’s challenge or burning question.

2. Should not be generic information you can google or ask ChatGPT.

3. High quality execution (design, audio, content and it’s delivery).

5 steps: how to approach lead magnet creation

1. Why are you doing this? I mean not your mission to educate (which is undoubtedly good), but for the business or personal reasons. Is that to get more followers or leads? More newsletter subscribers? If you don’t have a real “number” reason behind it, it would be super hard to create and launch it.

2. Understand what you have (templates you have worked on, information you have gathered, something you have learned, network of people you can interview). It’s a lot easier to start when you have something at least as a draft.

3. Choose what would match requests from your followers and connections on LinkedIn, what your customers ask when they reach out? What are the hot topics in the market now? What they ask you about most frequently?

4. Decide on format and design: video, pdf guide or checklist. I usually plan out the content in google doc (take the raw information and start organizing it so it’s easy to follow) and then move to design editor (my tooling was Miro and Canva).

5. Publish and promote. I make my lead magnets available on Maven via email form or on LinkedIn (if people connected and left a comment). I have planned out posts and then did some reminder posts. And actively engage with people in comments.

What can you expect.

1. Sign ups to newsletter, course

2. Increased following on LinkedIn

3. MQLs (marketing qualified leads)

What you can not expect:

Sales, revenue (not directly, but maybe eventually). Seriously, don’t focus on that.

Check some good examples, where lead magnets work very very well.

1. Superside webinars (videos)

2. Rask AI education market research (pdf guide)

3. Clever girl finance - worksheets for budgeting and investing (spreadsheets)

4. AI creative strategist from Evan Carroll (LinkedIn following growth)

5. Hubspot website grader (calculator)

Let me know, was this helpful? Do you plan to use lead magnets for generating MQLs or growing your following?